Still, Bosch knew that a murder book could be manipulated to give this impression. The truth would be revealed as he delved deeper and continued his own investigation. He knew there could be a vast difference between what was recorded and what was not.
According to the murder book, Green and Garcia quickly reversed investigative directions when suicide was dismissed after the autopsy was completed and the gun found with the body was analyzed. The case was reclassified as a homicide that had been disguised as a suicide.
Bosch first came to the autopsy findings in the murder book. He had read a thousand autopsy protocols and had attended several hundred of the procedures as well. He knew to skip all the weights and measurements and descriptions of the actual procedure and go right to the summary section and the attendant photographs. Unsurprisingly, he found the cause of death listed as a gunshot wound to the chest. The estimated time of death was between midnight and 2 a.m. on July 6. The summary noted that no witness reported hearing the shot, so the time of death estimate was based solely on measuring loss of body temperature.
The surprises were in the other findings. Rebecca Verloren had long, thick hair. At the right side of the base of her neck, beneath the fall of her hair, the medical examiner found a small circular burn mark that was about the size of a button off an oxford shirt. Two inches from this mark was another burn mark, much smaller than the first. High white cell counts in the blood surrounding these wounds indicated that both had been sustained close to but not at the time of death.